Rumble—!!
Just as the Third Raikage led two hundred elite Kumogakure shinobi as the spearhead of the assault, with several hundred elite support troops several thousand meters behind them acting as the shaft of the spear and preparing to follow close behind—
An overbearing killing intent that pressed forward without retreat, one that looked down upon entire armies, suddenly descended and locked firmly onto this Kumogakure force!
"Hm!?"
The commander of the Kumogakure support force, Diga, felt his heart violently tighten as a sharp warning exploded through his mind!
He did not even have time to figure out what was happening before a violent gale carrying snow and shattered stones slammed straight toward him!
A figure suddenly burst out from the snowstorm at the flank!
The speed was so fast it left behind nothing but a blurry afterimage across the retina.
Even more terrifying was the fact that every single heavy step the newcomer took caused the surrounding air to violently quake, exploding into rings of visible white shockwaves. The shockwaves stacked layer upon layer like raging tidal waves, surging outward in every direction with each step and carving long trenches into the ground along the path!
"Enemy attack! Formation!"
Commander Diga roared.
The instant the order was given, the man and woman beside him—the vice commanders of the unit, Daina and Gaia—immediately formed hand seals.
At the same time, the several hundred Kumogakure shinobi behind them displayed astonishing tactical discipline and synchronization, moving almost entirely on instinct!
Lightning Release: Lightning Serpent!
Lightning Release: Earth Flow!
Lightning Release: Wild Dance!
Lightning Release: Lightning Spear!
In an instant, dozens—hundreds—of Lightning Release techniques illuminated the battlefield in different forms.
Massive lightning serpents twisted forward in attack, blue-white currents spread across the ground like spiderwebs, and sharp lightning spears tore through the air!
All kinds of Lightning Release attacks intertwined into a thunderstorm overflowing with destructive force, crashing down toward the intruder's position!
At the same time, countless kunai and shuriken infused with Lightning Release chakra shot forward like torrential rain!
However, the charging figure—Higashino Shinichi—completely ignored all of it!
Not only did his momentum not slow in the slightest, it instead continued to rise.
As he accelerated continuously, that domineering battle intent and killing pressure seemed to solidify into something tangible. Before he had even arrived, his sheer presence already resembled a peerless murderous blade drawn from its sheath, carrying a sharpness capable of piercing through everything as it slammed violently into the Kumogakure formation.
What terrifying pressure!
Diga's pupils contracted slightly.
If not for the fact that every one of them was a battle-hardened elite with rigorous training, then this terrifying presence alone would have been enough to throw an ordinary unit into complete chaos and shake their will apart!
"Hah!"
With a sharp shout, Shinichi's body leapt high into the air.
Holding the "Adamantine Staff" in both hands, he faced the deadly net of intertwined lightning head-on in the most primitive and violent manner possible. Swinging both arms in a full arc, he smashed downward toward the densest center of the Kumogakure formation with overwhelming force!
At the instant it descended, the Adamantine Staff transformed into a gigantic pillar over dozens of meters long, its entire body flowing with crimson-gold radiance!
BOOM—!!!
The staff collided head-on with the first several massive bolts of lightning, erupting into an earth-shaking explosion!
The horrifying monstrous strength and highly condensed Fire Release chakra contained within the Adamantine Staff actually smashed the berserk Lightning Release energy apart by force!
The gigantic shockwave mixed with countless fragments of shattered blue-white lightning, surging wildly in every direction like an out-of-control hurricane!
Towering clouds of dust and snow instantly swallowed that entire area.
And within the chaotic dust storm that blocked all vision—
"ROAR!!"
A white-furred humanoid giant ape over two meters tall, its muscles knotted like forged steel, burst violently out from the endless cloud of dust like a falling meteor!
Descending from above the smoke and crashing with pinpoint precision straight into the very center of the several hundred Kumogakure elites!
The instant it landed, a visible circular shockwave exploded outward from the impact point. The earth trembled violently as several Kumogakure shinobi who failed to dodge in time coughed blood and were blasted flying!
At the very same moment—
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Amid the continuous sound of air being torn apart, more than a dozen figures identical to Shinichi himself charged violently out from the still-unsettled smoke and lightning.
At the front, Shinichi raised one leg high like a battle axe. Like another human-shaped meteor, carrying a presence no weaker than the Monkey King Enma himself, he followed directly behind Enma's landing point and stomped heavily toward the Kumogakure formation!
Behind him were two shadow clones.
One held the Sword of the Thunder God, its golden lightning blade crackling violently and radiating destructive sharpness.
The other dragged behind him the "Flowing Cloud Blade", the sword glowing crimson-red like blood and releasing scorching heat and murderous sharpness!
The two transformed into one golden and one crimson streak of sword light, charging from left and right close behind him!
As Shinichi's "Monster Strength" and chakra converged into the devastating downward stomp, the earth violently caved inward. Berserk impact force and raging winds exploded outward from the landing point once again, further shattering the already chaotic Kumogakure formation created by Enma's impact!
At the instant he landed, without needing a single glance or word of communication, Enma immediately understood his intentions.
The massive body suddenly kicked off the ground like a reverse-fired cannonball, leaping violently toward Shinichi's position!
While spinning rapidly through the air, its body transformed at incredible speed. In a flash of light, the savage white-furred giant ape once again became the pitch-black Adamantine Staff with dark-gold ends!
The Adamantine Staff traced a perfect arc through the air and landed precisely within Shinichi's outstretched right hand!
Almost at the exact instant his five fingers fully tightened around the staff, Shinichi borrowed the momentum of his landing and the twisting force of his waist to suddenly swing backward with explosive force!
Driven by his will, the Adamantine Staff seemed to come alive as the staff body expanded violently!
From roughly two meters in length, it instantly extended to over twenty meters long!
The thick black staff body tore through the air with a shrill howl, like the tail of a giant dragon sweeping across an army. Carrying an unstoppable force, it smashed horizontally toward more than a dozen Kumogakure elite shinobi behind him who were trying to regroup and prepare a counterattack!
The expressions of those dozen or so Kumogakure shinobi changed drastically.
Some raised their blades to block.
Others tried to retreat with the Body Flicker Technique.
But the speed and power behind the Adamantine Staff's sweep were simply too terrifying!
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
A dense chain of heavy impacts and the sound of shattering bones exploded one after another!
The seven or eight Kumogakure shinobi struck head-on by the twenty-meter-long giant staff had their weapons shattered instantly. Their entire bodies were sent flying like they had been hit head-on by a full-speed train, coughing up blood mixed with fragments of internal organs as they were hurled into the distance like broken sacks. By the time they hit the ground, they no longer made a sound!
The few farther to the sides who had only been brushed by the edge of the staff wind were also sent flying by the violent impact force, their muscles torn and bones shattered as they screamed and rolled across the ground, completely losing the ability to fight!
With a single strike, more than a dozen Kumogakure elites were either killed or gravely wounded by that savage and unreasonable sweep of the staff!
At the same time, the two shadow clones behind Shinichi—one wielding the Sword of the Thunder God and the other the "Flowing Cloud Blade"—had already followed him like shadows, transforming into two deadly streaks of light, one gold and one crimson, instantly cutting into the group of Kumogakure shinobi that had just been blasted away by the sweep!
The sword light exploded like thunder or surged like flames, carrying out brutal finishing strikes with precise and ruthless efficiency!
"It's Higashino Shinichi! Kill him!"
A furious roar exploded from within the Kumogakure ranks.
Commander Diga instantly recognized the Konoha genius who had recently been marked in Kumogakure intelligence as a top-priority elimination target.
The instant the order was given, all the remaining Kumogakure elites displayed astonishing military discipline. Even after suffering a sudden ambush, they reorganized defensive and counteroffensive formations in an extremely short amount of time!
Chakra surged.
The piercing hiss of electricity rang out densely across the battlefield.
One dangerous Lightning Release technique after another rapidly condensed in their hands. Lightning spheres, lightning spears, and lightning nets gathered power, all aimed firmly at the staff-wielding youth with the intent to kill him on the spot!
However, Shinichi moved faster than they could release their ninjutsu!
Countless tiny arcs of lightning suddenly exploded around his body.
His speed skyrocketed in an instant as he transformed into a blurry streak of lightning tearing through the air, charging directly toward the nearest Kumogakure squad that was hurriedly forming hand seals!
The Adamantine Staff in his hands was already swinging upward during his charge, transforming into a roaring tempest!
Layer upon layer of staff shadows surged forth, and the wind pressure they generated released shrill screams like ghosts wailing and wolves howling, as though a monstrous tidal wave had erupted from thin air, crashing down upon that Kumogakure squad in the most savage and direct physical manner possible!
Crack!!
The frontmost Kumogakure shinobi had their weapons shattered instantly, their bones pulverized as they were blasted away like ants and sent flying through the air.
The Kumogakure shinobi behind them were then smashed directly by the bodies of their own comrades. The explosive sound of bones snapping rang out repeatedly alongside muffled groans and startled screams.
Even the previously stable rear defensive line was smashed into total chaos by the chain collision!
At that moment, the Lightning Release attacks previously organized by Commander Diga and launched from farther away finally arrived with shrieking force, like dense blue lightning spears attacking Shinichi from every direction!
At the same time, another twenty Kumogakure elites with especially fierce presences—clearly specialists in taijutsu and swordsmanship, experts in close-range combat—charged toward Shinichi from the flanks and rear under the personal leadership of Vice Commander Gaia, like a pack of sharks smelling blood!
Shinichi's expression did not change.
He swung the Adamantine Staff in a full circle once more, turning it into an airtight barrier that forcibly smashed apart or deflected a large number of the incoming Lightning Release techniques, causing them to explode into showers of scattered sparks!
Then his figure flickered backward and sideways like a phantom, narrowly avoiding the remaining tricky Lightning Release attacks by mere inches.
The instant he evaded the final lightning spear and his body paused ever so slightly, two Kumogakure shinobi rushing from the rear flank had already slashed their blades toward him!
Without even turning his head, Shinichi borrowed the momentum of his movement and thrust backward with the staff in an incomparably exquisite counterstrike!
"Extend!"
The front end of the Adamantine Staff suddenly expanded violently with the wind, like a venomous dragon bursting from its cave. Carrying terrifying spiral piercing force, it shot forward at astonishing speed.
Pfft! Pfft!
With two soft sounds, it pierced straight through the chests of the two Kumogakure elites attempting to attack him!
The staff burst out through their bodies in a spray of blood. Their eyes dimmed instantly as their corpses hung limply from the staff.
But at the tiny instant after Shinichi completed this fierce counterattack, before the long staff had fully retracted—
"Die!!"
Vice Commander Gaia—the jōnin famed for his swordsmanship, Lightning Release, and Body Flicker Technique—had already relied on his terrifying speed to reach the dead angle behind Shinichi!
The broad Kumogakure blade in his hands was now flooded with an enormous amount of Lightning Release chakra. The sword body was completely wrapped in blinding blue-white lightning that crackled explosively.
With all his strength, he brought the blade slashing down viciously toward Shinichi's completely exposed neck and head!
The timing! The angle! The power!
All of it had reached perfection!
Shinichi's senses had long since detected the threat behind him, and the corner of his vision had already caught sight of that blazing lightning blade. Just as he was about to move—
The Flying Thunder God kunai at his waist suddenly trembled ever so slightly, releasing a faint glimmer of light!
The next instant—
Swish!
A golden figure appeared out of nowhere as though born directly from the void itself, materializing instantly behind Shinichi without the slightest warning, perfectly positioned between Shinichi and the descending blade of Gaia!
Namikaze Minato!
The timing of his appearance was so precise it sent chills down the spine, as though he had already predicted every single one of Gaia's movements in advance.
In his hand, he held a Flying Thunder God kunai in a reverse grip, and at the tip of the blade, highly compressed cyan Wind Release chakra had already condensed, releasing a sharp screeching howl!
The instant Minato appeared, his attack had already been launched as well.
The kunai in his hand transformed into an afterimage nearly impossible to follow with the naked eye, slicing across the throat of Gaia—who, because he had committed fully to his downward strike, could no longer pull back his momentum or make any effective evasive movement!
"Wha—?!"
Gaia's pupils shrank violently.
At the very last moment of his life, all he managed to see was the newcomer's iconic blond hair and those icy blue eyes before—
A head shot into the sky.
Scalding blood erupted from the severed neck like a fountain!
The headless body still maintained the posture of charging forward with its blade raised. It staggered ahead another two steps before crashing heavily to the ground.
"Nicely done, Shinichi!"
After succeeding in a single strike, Minato did not pause in the slightest. He did not even spare another glance at the corpse.
At the same time his words fell, chakra exploded beneath his feet, and his body already drifted backward at extreme speed like a golden phantom, effortlessly evading several incoming Lightning Release techniques and ninja tools launched from other directions by Kumogakure shinobi thrown into fury and shock by the death of their commander.
While retreating, his hands moved like a magician's trick, producing more than a dozen brand-new Flying Thunder God kunai seemingly from nowhere before throwing them toward every direction across the battlefield.
The kunai had only just left his hands and were still spinning through the air—
Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish! Swish!
The golden flash began!
Minato's figure began flashing continuously across the battlefield in a dazzling chain of instantaneous movements!
Every flash placed him precisely beside a Flying Thunder God kunai that had either just landed or was about to land.
Every appearance was accompanied by an attack of absolute speed and absolute lethality—either a throat sliced open or a heart pierced through!
His movements were fast to the absolute extreme.
There were no unnecessary flourishes.
Only the simplest and most efficient killing.
The twenty Kumogakure close-combat elites who had followed Gaia in rushing toward Shinichi had not even fully recovered from the shock of their vice commander being instantly killed, nor had they managed to reorganize any effective encirclement or defensive formation.
The golden flash had already passed among them like the scythe of death.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The heavy sounds of corpses collapsing blended together into one continuous chain.
In the blink of an eye, all twenty Kumogakure elites who had charged forward—including Vice Commander Gaia himself—had become corpses, their faces still frozen with disbelief and confusion.
What artistic killing.
Shinichi sighed inwardly.
Compared to his own overwhelmingly violent and earth-shaking style of attack, Minato's combat style was astonishingly simple, yet far more efficient.
...
Damn it, Namikaze Minato again!
Commander Diga was horrified.
He immediately shouted, "It's Namikaze Minato! Execute Plan C! Hurry!"
The instant the order was given, the remaining Kumogakure shinobi immediately moved once more, rapidly switching into an extremely scattered skirmishing formation with large spacing between individuals while moving continuously in fast and irregular patterns.
After suffering repeated harassment from Minato over the past several days and paying no small price in blood, the Kumogakure shinobi had been forced to summarize a few targeted countermeasures—or rather, strategies that were better than nothing at all.
That was the so-called Plan C.
However, this so-called Plan C merely allowed most Kumogakure shinobi to die slightly slower and struggle slightly longer.
It could not truly change the outcome.
"Be careful, Shinichi!"
After leaving behind those words, Minato vanished once again, no one knowing where he had gone.
Shinichi did not bother worrying about where Minato had disappeared to, because at that moment, his own squad members had already arrived.
Though it sounded lengthy, everything had happened in an extremely short span of time.
From the moment Shinichi charged headfirst into the Kumogakure formation like a spear piercing straight through it, to Minato appearing and instantly harvesting twenty-one Kumogakure shinobi, only a few breaths had actually passed.
Only now did the other members of Shinichi's battalion finally arrive at the edge of the battlefield!
Three hundred Konoha shinobi witnessed the sight of their captain standing alone in the center of the enemy formation, corpses littering the ground beneath his feet while the Kumogakure formation around him was thrown into chaos and their morale visibly shaken.
The veteran members were relatively calm.
They were already long accustomed to their captain's ferocious combat style of personally charging ahead to smash apart the enemy's formation and rhythm in order to create the best possible opening for the main force.
But the newly joined members were utterly stunned!
Although they had long heard through battlefield reports and rumors that this Captain Higashino Shinichi possessed monstrous strength despite his young age, witnessing with their own eyes a single man violently charging into several hundred Kumogakure elites and throwing the entire battlefield into complete chaos while inflicting catastrophic casualties still delivered an overwhelming shock.
"Move!"
"Support the captain!"
The three hundred members of Shinichi's battalion instantly charged toward the already chaotic Kumogakure flank force, crashing into them with murderous force before rapidly becoming entangled with the outer Kumogakure troops in brutal combat!
And at that very moment, Shinichi moved once more!
The "Adamantine Staff" rose once again in his hands as his body shot forward like a cannon shell.
More than a dozen shadow clones around him moved simultaneously, especially the two wielding the Sword of the Thunder God and the Kusanagi Sword, following close behind!
Coordinating with the battalion members attacking from outside, they launched a devastating assault from both within and without, aiming to heavily cripple—or outright annihilate—the shaft of the Third Raikage's spear!
Rumble—!!
At the same time, the enormous commotion erupting from the rear finally drew the attention of the Third Raikage, who was leading two hundred Kumogakure shinobi at the very front of the charge.
The Third Raikage turned his gaze toward the rear.
He had originally assumed it was that infuriatingly slippery Namikaze Minato again.
But instead, he saw someone he did not expect.
At the same moment, on the opposite end of the battlefield, Shinichi—who had just swept the Adamantine Staff horizontally and blasted away three Kumogakure shinobi attempting to form hand seals together with their unfinished jutsu—also happened to turn his head back.
Separated by several thousand meters, amidst the endless sea of people and chaotic flames of war—
Their gazes met perfectly.
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